We Just Got a Look Down One Possible Timeline for the 2020 Election
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA-Something very strange was happening amid the barns on Tuesday. Joe Biden was, yes, barnstorming the state, and El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago was flying into Council Bluffs for another of his organized wankfests, and many people were pretending that it already was October of 2020. Fans of both men were happy to go along, since the only raison d'etre for Biden's candidacy is that he can fend off what he calls the "existential threat" that is the current administration*, and it seems that the president* is spending most of his time talking about the former vice president.
Telling his customary lies on the White House lawn Tuesday afternoon, the president* managed to burp up a little seventh-grade invective of the sort that his supporters-and too many reporters-believe makes him a political juggernaut.
When a man has to mention my name 76 times in his speech, that means he’s in trouble. He’s a different guy. He acts different than he used to. He looks different than he used to...I think Joe is weak mentally...I think he’s the weakest mentally. I like running against people that are weak mentally. I think Joe is the weakest up here.
He also took a single sheet of paper out of his pocket and claimed it was the great deal he'd worked out with Mexico-the one that he was lying about a week ago. He isn't even a good Joe McCarthy cosplayer. But he is indeed, as the late George V. Higgins once put it, as soft as church music.
Meanwhile, down in Ottumwa, Biden went long on his basic campaign spiel: that four more years of the kind of thing we saw on the White House lawn is untenable for the country and its political institutions. He was not bubbly Uncle Joe. He was dead-eyed serious and he spoke slowly. He mercifully gave us all a break from his ridiculous notion that Republicans will stop behaving like Republicans once this president* is off the scene. (That idea makes him look older than his tone of voice ever will.) This will be spun as Biden's confirming the president*'s earlier slanders, but Biden wasn't talking like a tired old man. He was talking like a weary veteran police lieutenant who comes into interrogation to close the deal.
I believe the president is an existential threat to America for three reasons. One, he is a genuine threat to our core values. If you wonder about that, remember back to Charlottesville and his comment after that that there were very fine people in both groups. No president of the United States, Democrat or Republican, has ever, ever, ever said that. And it was a response heard around the world...This is a guy who does everything to separate and frighten people. It's about fear and loathing. When he calls people the names he calls them. No president has done anything like that, for god's sake. It's bizarre, and it's damaging.
So I think he's a threat to our core values and I think he's a threat to our standing around the world. On the D-Day ceremonies, it was astounding to me that he was tweeting attacks on everybody from the mayor of London to Bette Midler. He found time to go after Bette Midler, for god's sake, in the middle of the D-Day ceremonies. And, instead of repairing relationships with our allies, he's continued to damage them. No president of the United States has ever...threatened to leave NATO...embracing dictators and thugs, from Putin to Kim Jong-un, calling them "my friends," sending them love letters while he's poking his finger in the eyes of our allies. What's going on here?
So, for one day, in one place, we got a rare look forward down one timeline on which will run the 2020 presidential election. Was it edifying? I'm not entirely sure, but, when this president* is involved, "edifying" is the last thing any public exercise is. Somebody is going to bust this guy for sure. One hopes, anyway.
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